Was It Worth It? Did We Achieve Anything?

Written by Kristin Jack

I have to confess, after Susan and I relocated to NZ after 16 years in Cambodia with Servants, these two questions hung over me like a dark cloud.

We had gone out full of youthful enthusiasm and with a profound sense of call. We were completely sure that we were meant to go with Servants to Cambodia and throw our lot in with the country as it re-emerged from the nightmare of the Khmer Rouge years.

When our team first arrived in the country, with a mandate to provide health care for the urban poor in one small corner of Phnom Penh, the needs were overwhelming and we barely knew where to start. But God was faithful, and we built friendships with neighbours and  health prorgrammes that met deep needs.

One of earliest contacts in the slum we moved into was with Phanna’s family, who lived about 100 meters from our little house. Phanna’s father was gravely ill, and  another neighbour sensed God asking the few Christians in the neighbourhood to go and care for him. So she rounded us up, and we spent the next few weeks nursing Phanna’s dad, praying for him, and sharing our stories of faith and hope. Photos on the wall showed that he had once been a great bear of a man, an officer in the military. But now he was skin and bones, struggling for breath.  Later we would discover that Phanna’s dad was one of the very earliest cases of HIV/AIDS in Cambodia. Within a few weeks Phanna’s dad had passed into eternity, but not before the Spirit of God had come upon him, and he had urged his wife and children to become followers of Jesus.

Phanna was nine when he lost his father.

Phanna’s mum, Chatha was vivacious and funny = and a great evangelist. She told anyone and everyone about her new found relationship with Jesus. Over the next three years she became one of our best friends in that community. We hung out together a lot. But then she developed a string of strange health problems, including a neck abscess that refused to respond to antibiotic treatment. X-rays showed she had a form of TB that had begun to explode across her body. Susan used every scrap of medical knowledge she had to  help her, but nothing seemed to make any difference. Then a blood test result  confirmed that she had HIV/AIDS. It was only then we realised what  her husband had died of, and what he had passed onto her.

Phanna was 12 when he lost his mother.

As Phanna grew through his teen age years and into a young man, we continued to be close to him and his brothers and sisters. We helped Phanna through school and into a couple of vocational training programmes. There were ups and downs, but Phanna was growing into a young man with a huge heart for kids living on the street, and for kids who like him who had lost their parents.

Our Servants team had worked for years with Cambodian friends to set up a local NGO called TASK, which would take over the health mandate Servants had been given by the Government a decade earlier.  One of the programmes set up was a market-garden come informal-school which worked with street-kids providing a place of safety and acceptance, and helped them come off the glue and amphetamines that were so rampant on the streets. Phanna helped to lead this programme, and his strength, humour, and ability to empathise with the kids meant they readily responded to his leadership and example. It was a beautiful and effective programme.

When Susan & I returned to NZ in 2010, it felt like things were in good hands. Other Servants workers were continuing to mentor Phanna. The number of programmes TASK was running had expanded, and funding was pouring in. International donors loved TASK, its programmes, and the fact that it was 100% Khmer staffed and lead.

Then disaster. Six months after we’d returned to NZ, we heard of a split in the staff. Some of the staff were accusing the Director and the Chair of the Board of mismanaging funds. Rather than addressing the issues raised, the Director and Chair responded by firing the staff who had raised the issues. They refused to go quietly. Law suits followed. Death threats followed. TASK imploded and donors fled.  Programmes that had been helping hundreds of people suddenly collapsed.

We were gutted, despondent, broken. What had we done, or failed to do, that had contributed to this mess? We had mentored most of the people who had ended up at each other’s throats issuing death threats. It felt like a huge failure. And personally – I felt like a huge failure.

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Eight years have passed since that heart-breaking mess. It’s 2018, and last month our friend Phanna, now 25? came to New Zealand to speak at the ‘missions month’ being run by a large church in our city. Over the past few years Phanna has been working as a Pastor and church planter in the same  community he grew up in, and where we lived as neighbours. His congregation are mostly poor – many of them former street kids – but growing. He’s also now married, and has two beautiful kids of his own!

It’s been about ten years since we last saw Phanna, and it’s an emotional reunion. We’re at an event where he is sharing the story of his life. Parts of it are difficult and the tears well-up, both for him and for us as we listen. He tells the audience that Susan and I weren’t very good evangelists – he doesn’t remember us telling him about Jesus or the way to be saved. But, he adds, he saw and felt the love of Jesus in us, and that was enough. Later, someone asks him what kind of missionaries are needed in a place like Cambodia. He says: “those who will come and live with the people, and get to know the people, and love the people, and stay long enough to do life with the people. We don’t need any more of those who come and hand out food and take photos and leave. No, we need people like all the Servants missionaries I knew who loved me and who helped me through my life over the years”.

Is it worth it? Did we really achieve anything at all?

I look at Phanna standing tall and speaking with passion to this room full of people; I look at his life of compassion and empathy, at his love for God and for those around him, and I decide that even if he were the only person we ever affected in our whole sixteen years there in Cambodia, then……

…..Yes, it was worth it.

 

To hear more of Phanna’s story, click here to listen to a 30 minute interview between Phanna and Susan Jack, recorded at Dunedin City Baptist Church in May of 2018.